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[kaijyuu]

I had an epiphany last night about what exactly it is that's currently bothering me about DF: Obtaining access to the lower caverns, magma sea and adamantine is too simple.

The problem in a nutshell:
Magma and adamantine are some of the most prized tools one can obtain in this game, for obvious reasons. In days past, it was cause for celebration if you actually found some. Not anymore, though; it's piss easy to dig straight down, completely avoiding all the dangers of the caverns, and finding magma + adamantine in the very first season with nothing but a single miner. It's too predictable, as magma and adamantine are now, for me at least, given parts of the early construction of every fortress. Is that how it should be?

Having early access to this stuff devalues many things. A volcano over there? Bleh, who cares? Nothing but copper on the map? No problem! Train up a weapon smith on bolts, an armor smith on shields, and in about a year you can crank out masterwork adamantine stuff. I want volcanoes to be useful and important again, and not just minor conveniences. I want copper, iron and steel to have more military applications than as bolts.


My proposed solutions:
Toady's a creative guy and I suspect he'd be able to come up with better specific solutions than I. So, here are some "generic" things I'd change; how to accomplish it should be up to Toady.

Make caverns be actual obstacles
Currently caverns are completely and utterly avoidable. If you don't want to deal with them, you can just wall up whatever holes you accidentally punch in them, then tunnel down through a pillar. In my opinion, it shouldn't be so easy. Getting past a cavern should require "conquering" it, or at least some creative engineering to avoid what it can throw at you. Barriers for avoiding the caverns could be stuff like underground aquifers or simple open space; imagine if caverns had almost no connections on the map between their ceiling and their ground. Or something else. Point is, I shouldn't be able to ignore them without doing some work to negate their danger.

Make things less predictable, the magma sea especially
There are almost never logistical barriers to setting up a metal industry directly over the top of the magma sea. The thing is simply very tame and unthreatening. Finding the magma sea should be one thing; using it should be another. As there's a hell of a lot of weight pushing down on it, why not pressurize magma from the sea? A different idea would be perhaps adding some open space and making it more like a cavern. When I find the magma sea, I should be saying to myself "hrm, how am I going to be able to utilize this?" Beasties there should be a lot scarier too, as they're made from liquid fire after all.

Adamantine. Actually I think this is more or less ok due to it being unpredictable whether or not you'll breach hell by digging it out. No real changes there, so long as it's harder to reach in the first place.


In closing, I just think that obtaining magma and adamantine should be a project in it's own. Something you work toward over the course of years, not a single season. Danger should go exponentially up as you dig further down.


Oh, and as a side note, I presume we're all mature enough to be able to discuss this sort of thing without quips like "well if it's too easy, make it artificially harder for yourself." Self imposed challenges are fine and all, but hardly solutions to problems with the game itself. Not to say you can't disagree with me about it being too easy, just don't try to use self imposed difficulty as a justification.

[Vattic]

Make caverns be actual obstacles
Currently caverns are completely and utterly avoidable. If you don't want to deal with them, you can just wall up whatever holes you accidentally punch in them, then tunnel down through a pillar. In my opinion, it shouldn't be so easy. Getting past a cavern should require "conquering" it, or at least some creative engineering to avoid what it can throw at you. Barriers for avoiding the caverns could be stuff like underground aquifers or simple open space; imagine if caverns had almost no connections on the map between their ceiling and their ground. Or something else. Point is, I shouldn't be able to ignore them without doing some work to negate their danger.

My favourite solution to walling up when you breach the caverns is to have cavern creatures that will happily smash your constructed walls down if there is no other path. This wouldn't stop people digging their way past caverns through natural pillars so perhaps allow tunnelling creatures to go through natural stone if you've dug down past a cavern without breaking it. Again this should only occur if there is no other path to avoid them making Swiss cheese of your map. These solutions would force the player to create defensible entrances and post troops rather than just wall up. Tunnelling during sieges is controversial but confirmed by Toady so perhaps he'd be open to something like this.

I'm not sure if it would be possible to generate caverns that force you to breach them by their layout alone. I like their being cavern walls for digging forts into and would dislike seeing no connection between ceiling and floor. Aquifers or pockets of water sound like good barriers. You could have a new stone that blocked your way past the caverns which is only mineable with picks made with an ore found much deeper; A bit gamey I know.

Make things less predictable, the magma sea especially
There are almost never logistical barriers to setting up a metal industry directly over the top of the magma sea. The thing is simply very tame and unthreatening. Finding the magma sea should be one thing; using it should be another. As there's a hell of a lot of weight pushing down on it, why not pressurize magma from the sea? A different idea would be perhaps adding some open space and making it more like a cavern. When I find the magma sea, I should be saying to myself "hrm, how am I going to be able to utilize this?" Beasties there should be a lot scarier too, as they're made from liquid fire after all.

I'd really like their to be some space over the magma at least in places. It should have more dangerous creatures that want to kill your fort. Having it occasionally rise and lower wouldn't be such a challenge as a pump can be submerged safely.

The two main problems you've mentioned both would be solved by making it impossible to completely seal yourself off from the world. I can't think of many ways around this.

[peskyninja]

i think that the problem is related to that every map has the "same" geography :surface,soil,stone,1st cavern, 2nd cavern, 3dr cavern, magma + cotton, clowns.If you settle in any place you can be sure that there will be cotton,magma and caverns (not on that order) or maybe the dead animals zoo.

[IT 000]

Currently caverns are completely and utterly avoidable. If you don't want to deal with them, you can just wall up whatever holes you accidentally punch in them, then tunnel down through a pillar. In my opinion, it shouldn't be so easy. Getting past a cavern should require "conquering" it, or at least some creative engineering to avoid what it can throw at you. Barriers for avoiding the caverns could be stuff like underground aquifers or simple open space; imagine if caverns had almost no connections on the map between their ceiling and their ground. Or something else. Point is, I shouldn't be able to ignore them without doing some work to negate their danger.

The aquifer idea is only a temporary solution, and some players see it as more of a blessing then a curse. In order to make the caverns a more nastier place, we need nastier beasties. Currently [AMBUSH_PREDATOR] tag doesn't work so Giant Cave Spiders won't sneak up on you. We need to bring these creatures back, along with more tougher creatures. Finally the fog of war in the caverns shouldn't be permanent. If you haven't scouted a place for a few months it will gradually refill with blackness (this may also have a positive effect on framerate). This means when a forgotten beast appears on the edges you don't know it's there if it spawns in a black area. Visible range should also be reduced to 5-10 tiles around the dwarf instead of giant cells. Some of the more nastier creatures also could use a trap avoid tag.

There are almost never logistical barriers to setting up a metal industry directly over the top of the magma sea. The thing is simply very tame and unthreatening. Finding the magma sea should be one thing; using it should be another. As there's a hell of a lot of weight pushing down on it, why not pressurize magma from the sea? A different idea would be perhaps adding some open space and making it more like a cavern. When I find the magma sea, I should be saying to myself "hrm, how am I going to be able to utilize this?" Beasties there should be a lot scarier too, as they're made from liquid fire after all.

I like the open space idea, not a fan of the pressurization, considering that you normally break into the magma sea from above ( or at least I do) it just doesn't seem very threatening. One thing that should be changed about magma is increasing the temperature again (Also increasing the melting point of stone to have more magma-safe stone) otherwise people can drown in magma before they burn to death.

I suppose you could make a maze of SMR with diggable rock in between, that would at least throw a few loops into the players plans.

[zwei]

I am fan of tunelling creatures myself.

Make it very slow and you will basically force player to create passage for military that would deal with them.

Other than that, I would rather see underground being more important to breach for its benefits - right now, you have:

 * Wood - which is on surface.
 * Plants and their seeds - nothing you can't find on surface.
 * Revealed mineral veins of cluster - this saves some exploratory mining, but is not vital. You can easily ignore gem indistry and veins are not that hard to find.
 * Live combat xp, Meat and other spoils of killed creatures.
 * Water.
 * Cloth (silk).

This is all avaiable without breaching caverns.

Costs: Breaching carverns turns on FB spawning which can range from nuisance to reclaiming fort. And that is not really worth it for something that you can usually find on surface.

If the only underground thing of real value (magma) is not part of caverns, forcing people to breach caverns is not really proper answer.

[kaijyuu]

Re: Tunneling creatures.

This would be nice and all, but I'm not sure I like the idea of them only tunneling if they have no other route. I'm reminded of those tower defense games where the things attacking you only think to beat town your towers blocking their path if they have no other choice. It doesn't make much sense and is way too AI abusive to have them walk through your maze of traps instead of going through a 1 tile wall.

Perhaps they should constantly tunnel through natural walls, leaving constructed ones alone if at all possible (but still beat them down if reasonable). May as well have some up sides to building your fort out of constructed walls, as they can't be engraved.

Having [the magma sea] occasionally rise and lower wouldn't be such a challenge as a pump can be submerged safely.

I really like this idea. Might be killer on framerate though.

i think that the problem is related to that every map has the "same" geography :surface,soil,stone,1st cavern, 2nd cavern, 3dr cavern, magma + cotton, clowns.If you settle in any place you can be sure that there will be cotton,magma and caverns (not on that order) or maybe the dead animals zoo.

This is a worthy point to make, but I think it can be solved by making those features less predictable in what they do. So we can still have cavern 1 2 3 then magma sea, but finding out what each cavern does and figuring out how to counter its dangers should be the thing that is unpredictable. But yes, making the underground geography a lot more unknown is a valid solution.

The aquifer idea is only a temporary solution, and some players see it as more of a blessing then a curse. In order to make the caverns a more nastier place, we need nastier beasties. Currently [AMBUSH_PREDATOR] tag doesn't work so Giant Cave Spiders won't sneak up on you. We need to bring these creatures back, along with more tougher creatures. Finally the fog of war in the caverns shouldn't be permanent. If you haven't scouted a place for a few months it will gradually refill with blackness (this may also have a positive effect on framerate). This means when a forgotten beast appears on the edges you don't know it's there if it spawns in a black area. Visible range should also be reduced to 5-10 tiles around the dwarf instead of giant cells. Some of the more nastier creatures also could use a trap avoid tag.

Some of neat points here.
- New barriers and obstacles (be they aquifers or something else) being more of a blessing than a curse doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing to me. In fact, it sounds really nifty... provided they're still barriers. Even if someone has good uses for the aquifer, it's still going to take some effort to get through if they want to dig deeper.
- Definitely agree about nastier creatures and fog of war. I'll add though that I think they should get worse the further down you go. Cavern 2's monsters should be very much a step up in nastiness from cavern 1's, and cavern 3's a step up from cavern 2's. The magma sea's creatures should of course, be worst of all next to hell itself.

If the only underground thing of real value (magma) is not part of caverns, forcing people to breach caverns is not really proper answer.

This is a very good point. I will note though that caverns DO have one thing that can be very vital: water. Rivers and brooks aren't on every embark location. For the maps without surface water, utilizing cavern water can be a Fun experience. Also, GCS silk seems like it was intended as a risky but profitable cavern feature, except it's kinda lacking on both "risk" and "profit."

There should definitely be a lot more like that with the caverns though, I agree. More stuff that can't be found on the surface, especially stuff that requires making yourself vulnerable to cavern creatures to obtain.

[Bohandas]

I think that caverns are pretty good and as they are. In terms of realism there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to wall them back off and if the space between the floor and the ceiling of the cavern were completely empty it would collapse. And if you simply wall a cavern off it leaves you unable to use any of the stuff in it.

[Waparius]

A big excuse to make caverns less avoidable would be ratcheting up the difficulty of irrigated farming. If you make caverns and to a certain degree near-cavern tunnels have no need to irrigate, fertilise etc, make irrigation really tricky, and nerf farm plots so you need to farm a much larger area to feed your fortress, there would be a really good reason to go for the caves.

 Kind of like how FUN farming was in 2D dwarf fortress, because your fields would dry out every winter but the river would flood every spring, meaning you could have hassle-free farms next to it as long as you were willing to put up with giant toads jumping out every so often.

I'd bump the default average depth of the first cavern up from the 25-30ish it is now to something more like 5-15 levels, depending on the soil, and put more aboveground cave entrances as well. Also, make more underground crops, and have the most valuable ones grow deep, possibly even have something that needs magma irrigation. That would be even more interesting.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

I agree, and those are all good ideas.  I think Toady's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, because there's also the camp that says, "I want the complete game experience in every map," and that's why we have adamantine in, well, every map now.

It's true that it requires nearly no skill to dig deeper.  2d DF had a nice little progression of river-chasm-magma- that worked well from a gameplay point of view, and it could be taken as inspiration.  Aquiferous caverns, perhaps even pressurized, would be a a nice challenge-- it's possible to punch through aquifers, although it takes some thinking, and it always gives you that, "fuck yeah, I rule" feeling at the end, which is one of the things that fun gaming is all about.

The idea of an airy cavern with thin, web-like connections between floor and roof is appealing, but it's just too easy to wall off.  It would be so much nicer if it could prove a source of constant danger to ANY dwarf that had to go deeper than it.

I think that a change to magma workshops could restore some of the danger to magma workshops.  Magma beasties are already very dangerous (fireballs, wtf), but it's too easy to wall them off.  Remove the workshop's impassible tiles and suddenly you have a recipe for fun.

I kind of think that adamantine is still too easy, despite the hell risk.  I never feel like I'm the only fort in the world that has the wondrous metal.  I think that placing adamantine UNDER the magma sea would work for this.  First of all, a new player probably wouldn't really wonder what was under the magma sea, they'd just be excited to use magma forges.  After a while, they'd get curious, and start trying to figure out how to solidify the magma.  Breaking through a magma sea is a difficult task (well, impossible, with the way magma flow tiles work now, but that could change) and I think the player would have a really fun time exploring under the sea, finally discovering adamantine-- wow.  That was a challenge to reach.  When, of course, the real challenge lies just ahead....

It'd be pretty important for this stuff to play nicely with procedural generation.  When every map has aquifer, open air cavern, magma sea, it gets a little gamey.  Some adamantine poking through the magma would be fine, as would some maps without aquifer caverns.  The point is that every map should have at least one major engineering challenge between surface and adamantine, preferably, before the magma.

[Matoro]

I think that placing adamantine UNDER the magma sea would work for this.  First of all, a new player probably wouldn't really wonder what was under the magma sea, they'd just be excited to use magma forges.  After a while, they'd get curious, and start trying to figure out how to solidify the magma.  Breaking through a magma sea is a difficult task (well, impossible, with the way magma flow tiles work now, but that could change) and I think the player would have a really fun time exploring under the sea, finally discovering adamantine-- wow.  That was a challenge to reach.  When, of course, the real challenge lies just ahead....

 I agree that, it would add more risk to adamantine mining than it has now. Now you can dig all adamantine from 3rd cavern - magma sea without risko to breach HFS. If every tile adamantine mined would be one possiblity to relase HFS, mining would be much more dangerous.

Fog of war to caverns is a good idea. Especially when you first time breach to cavern, you see too much. Cavern exploration is nearly pointless for now, because so large areas turn visible.

And when we get cave-in -system working, it can be more dangerous dig in deep, if there's always risk for cave-in. In Magma sea you have hundreds z-levels of stone above your head, what is it all collapses because you haven't supported your magma furnace-place?

And sorry for missspells, I'm not natural english speaker.

[catoblepas]

A few possible solutions I thought of:

1) Underground sea. We have a sea of magma, why not a sea(s) of water? The Clowns in DF are inspired by the Balrog from the story of Moria, but what of the Watcher in the Water? Horror can lie not only in the fiery pits of hell, but also in the darkest depths of the ocean.

Problems: Breaching this would be impossible without cavins, as dwarves refuse to swim and mine. Also, if the sea was above the lava, there could be problems with people just draining the underground sea into the lava sea.

2)Tunneling monsters. Monsters like giant worms or something could 'walk' through tiles without harming them or being encased. (this would be less frustrating then having monsters breaking apart your nice walls and swiss-cheesing your fortress) This would make tunneling around in the lower levels dangerous, as there could be unseen monsters lurking in the walls. They could have tags like [SOFT_TUNNELER] and [HARD_TUNNELER] that would allow them to tunnel through soil and rock respectively. The only way to keep them out would be with block constructions or alternatively, metal walls/floors (which would definitely hinder expansion).

Problems: Countering tunnelers could be frustrating, as they would be difficult to detect. Perhaps there could be an alert message when they are about to come out of a wall nearby (perhaps dwarves would detect them with the observer skill?) "Urist has detected a scratching in the walls" At any rate, they could range from nuisances "Urist could not sleep due to rats in the walls", stealing food out of stockpiles, to dangerous predators.

3) Friendly Underground Civs: Some sort of representatives from one of the underground "primitive" civs could appear and seek an audience with your broker or mayor. This could lead to new trade opportunities, but the catch would be that they will only send underground caravans, perhaps with wagons and even roads. This would mean access to exotic underground trade items, but also opening up your fortress to potential attack by the denizens of the underworld via your trade depot.

[antymattar]

You guys are all wrong. In order to make caverna a more nastier place, we need to make caverns HAVE something that the player doesnt have. Id say that the most deadly thing in the game is the candy and most people just go and mine it up. WHY? Cause its useful. To me, caverns are useful just cause they may have water in them. but if not, then screw them. The only other thing I might want would be that the caverns are less like a sponge with their stupid formations and more like "surreal" open spaces with all sorts of stuff in them. Like, perhaps the small collums should be destroyed completely.

[catoblepas]

My third suggestion included both bonuses and maluses to breaching the cavern layers. Being able to trade with an underground civ would be very useful. Tame Giant Spiders, poisons,gems metals and minerals, etc.

[G-Flex]

You guys are all wrong. In order to make caverna a more nastier place, we need to make caverns HAVE something that the player doesnt have. Id say that the most deadly thing in the game is the candy and most people just go and mine it up. WHY? Cause its useful. To me, caverns are useful just cause they may have water in them. but if not, then screw them. The only other thing I might want would be that the caverns are less like a sponge with their stupid formations and more like "surreal" open spaces with all sorts of stuff in them. Like, perhaps the small collums should be destroyed completely.

You can manipulate how the caverns are shaped in worldgen parameters, but I agree that some aspects of it could be tweaked, like those weird single-tile-wide spiderwebby passageways (I'm not sure what these are supposed to represent).

Also: The caverns provide access to underground wood/grass (which I don't really think is a great design decision for other reasons), and open space. Open space doesn't matter much right now, because mining is extremely trivial, which I think it shouldn't be.

Generally, I agree with the OP on this.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

You guys are all wrong. In order to make caverna a more nastier place, we need to make caverns HAVE something that the player doesnt have. Id say that the most deadly thing in the game is the candy and most people just go and mine it up. WHY? Cause its useful. To me, caverns are useful just cause they may have water in them. but if not, then screw them. The only other thing I might want would be that the caverns are less like a sponge with their stupid formations and more like "surreal" open spaces with all sorts of stuff in them. Like, perhaps the small collums should be destroyed completely.

I can understand your point-- the reason people wall off the caverns is because the high risk (noxious secretions) isn't worth the low reward (yawn, trees).  If you change that ratio, people won't wall them off.

But just doing that doesn't address kaijyuu's concerns, which are that it's trivial to dig deep.  Things that should be big "Woots!" are just "Blah."  Things like magma workshops and adamantine access.  Making the caverns more useful won't address that.